I started a project called Choria that aimed to massively improve the deployment UX and yield a secure and stable MCollective setup for those using Puppet 4.

The aim is to make installation quick and secure, towards that it seems a common end to end install from scratch by someone new to project using a clustered NATS setup can take less than a hour, this is a huge improvement.

Further I’ve had really good user feedback, especially around NATS. One user reports 2000 nodes on a single NATS server consuming 300MB RAM and it being very performant, much more so than the previous setup.

It’s been a few months, this is whats changed:

The module now supports every OS AIO Puppet supports, including Windows.

Documentation is available on choria.io, installation should take about a hour max.

The PQL language can now be used to do completely custom infrastructure discovery against PuppetDB.

Many bugs have been fixed, many things have been streamlined and made more easy to get going with better defaults.

Event Machine is not needed anymore.

A number of POC projects have been done to flesh out next steps, things like a very capable playbook system and a revisit to the generic RPC client, these are on GitHub issues.

Meanwhile I am still trying to get to a point where I can take over maintenance of MCollective again, at first Puppet Inc was very open to the idea but I am afraid it’s been 7 months and it’s getting nowhere, calls for cooperation are just being ignored. Unfortunately I think we’re getting pretty close to a fork being the only productive next step.

For now though, I’d say the Choria plugin set is production ready and stable any one using Puppet 4 AIO should consider using these – it’s about the only working way to get MCollective on FOSS Puppet now due to the state of the other installation options.